Tag Archives: glass

In everyone’s favourite; blue and white. I think these are exquisite. Beautifully made, each bead unique and individual, capped with a sweet little gilt fixture, and then hand knotted in silk in between, in pristine condition.

Murano is a little collection of islands, just to the north of Venice, Italy, famed for its glass making. In 1291, all the glass makers in Venice were forced to move to Murano due to the risk of fire, and the tradition of bead making began. The glass makers soon became highly revered, and were allowed to wear swords, and marry into the nobility. Murano glass is highly collectable, and sought after. This colour is rare.

This gorgeous necklace is the perfect summer accessory, would look fabulous with white linen.

Available to buy here in my eBay shop, or directly via Paypal. You won’t be disappointed – it’s amazing!

“If you treat glass right, it doesn’t crack. If you know the properties, you can make things; the color of dusk and night and love. But you can’t control people like that and I really, really wish you could. I want the world to be glass.” (Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon).

On Venice’s famed isle of Murano, glass masters keep alive the art of lampworking. Each of the beads in these graceful Murano earrings is individually made over a hot flame, uno alla volta.

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.